Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 748
Frontenac’s parliament scheme of “estates” fell through. King Louis XIV struck it out. Frontenac was only King when the ice was there. With the spring ships, the rule of Louis XIV came back. Nor was ever any king more industrious or more watchful. He read all the dispatches from Canada. He made little notes on the side: “The King thinks this. . . . The King wishes that.” And what he wished was done. Our English history, as full of the odor of prejudice as an old cask, presents us a Louis XIV as a butterfly among ladies all in silk, slowly turning to a crooked old man among ladies all in wigs. In reality Louis was industry itself, sagacity. He knew men like Colbert and Frontenac when he saw them. But with peace established, complaints from New France reached the King right and left, and Frontenac had to go.
But Frontenac’s successors were men of no account, and the Indians knew it. The Iroquois had been playing back and forward with the French and English. Some had sided with the French, turned Christian, and became in time the “praying Indians,” those who founded our Caughnawaga beside Lachine. But now they all joined in a great council (1684) at Albany and allied themselves with the English. This time there was no Frontenac to oppose them, nor even Fort Frontenac to cover Montreal, for it had been abandoned. The Governor, De La Barre, moved soldiers and Indians to occupy it again; illness broke up his camp; he moved across Lake Ontario, threatened the Indians, like a schoolmaster who calls angrily for order, and then retired to France, glad to be gone. After him came Denonville, who took an army into the Seneca country, burning crops and wigwams. But this was like knocking down a wasps’ nest. They all came back.
With that the Iroquois prepared to wipe out French Canada. All the old danger was back again. In the middle summer of 1689 the first wave broke on the settlements around Montreal. Montreal itself they could not now so easily reach. For the plan of fortification carried out under a French royal engineer had put a wall of palisades and ditches all around it. But the outlying places were open. In the dead of night of August 5, 1689, amid the roar and glare of a Canadian summer thunderstorm, the Iroquois fell upon the settlement at Lachine. The massacre that followed is one of the terrible pages of our annals. Eighty soldiers, there on guard as an outpost, and with them two hundred inhabitants, men, women, and children, were butchered without mercy on the spot. One hundred and twenty were carried off, some to be burned forthwith at the stake, others to die by torture in the Indian lodges.
Frontenac came back to Canada that autumn, and a people wild with distress turned to him with joy as to salvation. He brought it. He chose strong men. He had with him De Callières, who was made Governor of Montreal, and such men as Greysolon du Lhut and Nicolas Perrot, coureurs des bois who knew the Indian country. By New Year’s he was among the Mohawks, giving them back their own. He rebuilt Fort Frontenac and carried war into the Indian country above. But the French power had sunk so low, the Indian danger had spread so wide, that not even Frontenac could at once restore safety. To protect one place was to invite an attack upon another. Witness, for instance, as a part of the history of the Montreal vicinity, the sudden attack on the fort at the seigneurie of Verchères, twenty miles down the river from Montreal on the south shore, in that meadowland which Champlain had so much admired. The garrison had been drawn off along with the seigneur himself, needed elsewhere. The defense of the fort by the girl Madeleine de Verchères, in command of three and a half men (one man was over eighty), is part of our schoolbook history. The motor tourist and the passenger on the passing ocean liner still gaze with awe and inspiration at this consecrated spot.
Hence it took Frontenac four years to beat the Indians down. But he did it. By 1696 he was able to set out from Montreal up the St. Lawrence with an army of two thousand men. They went by Fort Frontenac and Lake Ontario and laid waste all the country of the Onondagas and the Oneidas. When peace with England came, the Peace of Ryswick, in 1698, the Five Nations were glad enough to be, as our present slang has it, “included out” from both sides as neutral. Frontenac’s work was done. He died at Quebec on November 28, 1698. There he lies buried as Champlain before him and Montcalm to come.
But Frontenac, before he died, had broken the power of the Iroquois forever as far as wiping out French Canada was concerned. Henceforth they were just the devil allies of the British, the French having their own attendant devils too but not so good.
When Callières succeeded Frontenac as Governor of Canada a great peace was made between the French and the Iroquois (1701). When war broke out again with England, the War of the Spanish Succession, North America had to pay the price of ravage for the question as to which prince should inherit the throne of Spain.
But this time, fortunately for Montreal, the tide of war turned to the Atlantic coast and the St. Lawrence. The great military episodes of the war belong to the general history of Canada rather than to the present survey. The war ended with the Treaty of Utrecht, which gave to Great Britain the possession of Hudson Bay, Newfoundland, and Nova Scotia, but left to France its mainland Acadia (New Brunswick), its islands, Cape Breton and St. John, together with New France and the vast inland empire which it might include.
FOOTNOTES:
Laval, 1659, Bishop of Patræa in Partibus.
Leonidas Polk, Bishop and General, W. M. Polk, 1915.
Lahontan’s Journal, Ed., R. G. Thwaites, 1901.
CHAPTER V. The Old French Regime in Montreal
1713-63
THE CHTEAU DE Ramezay. Montreal at the Time of Charlevoix’s Visit. The New Fortifications of 1723. Life in Montreal. Social Distinctions and Classes. Slavery Under the Old Regime. Peter Kalm’s Visit of 1749. His Happy Picture of French Canada and Montreal. The Lot of the People as Compared with Later Times.
The Château de Ramezay, once the home of M. de Ramezay, a Governor of Montreal under the old French Regime, and later the residence of various British Governors, stands by itself in the lower part of the town in a beautiful isolation that time and courtesy have spared. It is at the faraway end of old Montreal, so far from the hotels and shops of the modern city that it seems to be, as it is, a part of another world. It is a fine old stone building, low and long, untouched, it would appear, by the hand of time, and looking just as it did two centuries ago. Its iron palings guard it; its cannon are still there in case the English come. Its row of poplar trees along the palings, diminished and vanishing, still rustic and whisper of Normandy. All around it and behind it is the open sky, a landscape effect impossible for modern cities. Broad, open spaces surround it as if the newer buildings instinctively drew back, respecting history and a lost cause. It is quite a distance across from the château to the great buildings of the City Hall and the Law Courts, or, shall we say, of the Hôtel de Ville and the Palais de Justice, buildings where taxpayers anguish and murder argues for its life. Their voices must not come across to the château. More space still is added by the open Jacques Cartier Square on this the hither side of the château, with the Nelson Monument by which, in a sort of paradox of history, Jacques Cartier seems congratulating Lord Nelson on Trafalgar.
This is the only site remaining where the remnants of old French Montreal have the opportunity of such isolation. All the rest of its past is intricately mixed with what is new. Maisonneuve still stands on his monument in Place d’Armes, looking across at Notre Dame Church and telling it what he thinks of the Iroquois. But the buildings of two trust companies look down upon them both. The streetcars make of the Place d’Armes a crowded turning point, and from a near-by street the skyscraper tower building of the Royal Bank looks down on Maisonneuve from such a height that it can hardly see him. Nor does it need to; under Maisonneuve’s management the site of the bank was only worth ten cents a year. They do better now.
Look through the palings of the château and you will see from the signboard that it is preserved thus as a museum. Anyone entering, on some empty, silent day, its spacious old wainscoted rooms finds them just as they were when filled two centuries ago with the soldiers and ladies of New France. It seems as if a whisper could bring them back, as if the creak of one of the old boards beneath their feet might make them turn to look. It is seldom that one gets a chance to bring the past so close. We always think of the people of past centuries in an unnatural way, stuffed and dressed and artificial, rendered romantic by the very thing we called romance. Here in these unaltered rooms they turn to people like ourselves, merry or sad, and, to those of us grown old, all young. One stands here in this old château, the prize of conquest, to muse, perhaps, upon its vanity. What right has it to be, this seizure of sovereignty, this forced allegiance by the power of arms? French Canada, we are always assured, is now a part of the British Empire; a “loyal” part was once the Victorian word, though we never use it now. One wonders. Can it be that there are no regrets, no backward glances? At least the reflection of what was here and what is should give to us in Canada a renewed understanding of our French compatriots and a new forbearance if ever needed.
The château was built by Claude de Ramezay, a Governor of Montreal (1703-24). He came to Canada as a young officer in 1685. He served in Iberville’s expedition against the English in Hudson Bay and led a Montreal force in Quebec in 1690 to aid Frontenac in his defense against Phipps’s vessels of war. He married and settled in Canada and built the château in 1705. It is a very common mistake to suppose that the château was the home of the French Governors. Indeed, De Ramezay had expected the King of France to buy it for this purpose. This was never done, and in the last years of the Old Regime it became the storehouse of the French West India Company. In those days the château looked across into the beautiful gardens of the Jesuits. Beside it on the town side, standing flush along Notre Dame Street, was a heavy old stone building, the house of the Baron de Bécancourt. This later became the warehouse of James McGill, founder of the university, and while still standing was commonly called the Old McGill House. It is all gone now.
Under the English Regime the château became Government House and remained so until Lord Metcalfe’s occupancy. It was used also by Benedict Arnold, though not by Montgomery, at the time of the American occupation of Montreal during the invasion of Canada. It was the headquarters of Benjamin Franklin and his colleagues on their mission to Montreal. After Lord Metcalfe the château was turned into offices, then into law courts, then into a normal school, then into offices again, and at last, in 1894, found a fitting repose as a museum.
There it sleeps. From such a vantage ground we may well review the old French Regime which it so well typifies.
It was the good fortune of the town of Montreal to enjoy an unbroken peace, or what was then regarded as such, from the Treaty of Utrecht until the final war, the Seven Years’ War (1756-63), which ended in the cession of Canada. It is true that war between England and France broke out again and that military expeditions were sent against western Indian tribes, but the town itself enjoyed an undisturbed existence. We enter here upon a period of peaceful and happy growth, not as idyllic in its simplicity as its sister colony, the Acadia of Evangeline, or as energetic in its forward movement as the British Montreal of a hundred years later, but a place of relative comfort, of Old World manners and courtesy, of conservative custom, and, if not of wealth, at least of no great poverty. Much that was to be lost in France in the turmoil that came later was here retained in Canada and Montreal, and much that was in the Montreal of the Old Regime exists here today as the basis of the life of our French compatriots. In looking at the old town we are viewing not the bygone past but a section of the past carried over and preserved in the present.
We are fortunate in having Montreal depicted for us as it was only eight years after the Peace of Utrecht, in the happy pages of Father Charlevoix, whose name is for all time connected with the history of Canada. Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix, who became a Jesuit priest at the age of sixteen, was sent out while still only twenty-three for four years as a teacher at Quebec and became henceforth a historian of New France and of America at large. He visited Montreal in 1708. Later on he was sent out (1720-22) to make an extensive tour in New France and the English Atlantic colonies, in the course of which he visited Montreal again in 1721 and wrote an extended account of it. His Histoire et Description Générale de la Nouvelle France (published in 1744) became and remains a firsthand authority for our history.
Charlevoix, in his first journey (1708), came up the river in summertime and noted, as did all travelers from Cartier onward, the beauty and fertility of what one may call the Montreal district — the country from the head of Lake St. Peter upward — as compared with the rugged and forbidding north shore from the Gulf to Tadoussac. His second journey (March 1721) offered the contrast of winter travel in a cariole, along the ice at the edge of the river and lake. His itinerary as between Quebec and Montreal gives us a view of the conditions of winter travel in French Canada, practically unchanged all through the Old Regime and long after, indeed until the coming of the railway. It runs as follows: Quebec to Three Rivers (about eighty-three miles), March 4 to March 6, three days; Three Rivers to the mouth of the Richelieu (about forty-seven miles), less than one day; thence to Montreal (about forty-nine miles), one day and part of another. The custom of thus breaking the journey to Montreal With convenient stopovers was usual both in summer and winter.
Winter travel by land was, of course, vastly superior to land travel in summer. New France, apart from the military highway from the St. Lawrence to the Richelieu (Montreal to Chambly), was, till 1733, roadless — at least in any large sense. It was, indeed, a part of the obligation of the seigneur and of the habitant to open roads from one riverside farm to the next. But as every settlement was connected with every other by water, these sidetracks were of little account. In 1733 the surveyor in chief, M. Lanouiller de Boisclerc, traced and connected a complete road from Quebec to Montreal, thenceforth a post road. When a regular mail service was thereupon set up from Quebec to Montreal the carriers went through without the stopover of the customary traveler.
“Montreal,” writes Charlevoix, “has a very pleasing aspect.” One notes at once that Charlevoix calls the place “Montreal,” the name “Ville Marie” having by this time dropped out of ordinary use. Similarly, along with the official name New France, he uses “Canada” as an alternate, a usage becoming so general that it appears in official correspondence. “The beauty of the country,” he continues, “and of its prospects, inspires a certain cheerfulness of which everybody is perfectly sensible. It is not fortified, only a simple palisade with bastions, in a very indifferent condition with a sorry redoubt on a small spot which serves as a sort of outlook and terminates in a gentle declivity, at the end of which is a small square. This is the place you first find on entering the city from the direction of Quebec.”
The old plans of Montreal (after 1723) show the fortifications as constructed by De Léry just after Charlevoix’s visit, the old palisades being demolished in 1722. One can recognize this north end of the city, of which he speaks, by the “windmill” (it was built in 1656) and the redoubt. The outlets through the wall show the St. Lawrence Gate, one of the five gates piercing the wall and leading out of the city toward the suburb of St. Lawrence in the direction we now call north. The main gateways in the direction up and down the river give us at the upper end the Porte des Recollets (corner of the present McGill and Notre Dame), through which Amherst’s victorious soldiers entered in 1760, and through which the defeated American General Hull and his fellow prisoners, 375 in number, were brought in 1812. One notes that one of the two roads which branch apart on leaving the gate is marked “Chemin de la Montagne.” People who write to the Montreal papers at recurrent intervals to say that our “Mountain” Street is called after Bishop Mountain (the first Protestant bishop) will do well to study this map which was made before the bishop was born. The gate at the same end nearer the river is the Porte la Chine, recalling again La Salle and his seigneurie. The other two main gates were the Harbour Gate (Porte du Port) and the Porte St. Martin on the lower end of the town, leading out of it toward Quebec. This naturally acquired the name the Quebec Gate. There were also lesser, or postern, gates.
“The seminary and the parish church,” writes Charlevoix, “the convent of the Recollets, the Jesuits, the Daughters of the Congregation, the Governor, and most of the officers dwell in the upper town.” By this he means St. James and Notre Dame Street. Of these buildings the Seminary of St. Sulpice (to which the seminary moved in 1712) is the only one still standing, though of course the beautiful grounds, reaching all the way to St. Paul Street, are practically all gone, nothing left but an embowered garden, so walled in, so lost and forgotten, that most Montrealers are unaware of its existence. The parish church of Notre Dame is still there as rebuilt in 1824. A tablet on the corner of Notre Dame and St. Hélène streets (north of McGill Street) reads: “Here stood until 1866 the church and monastery of the Recollet Fathers (1692), in which the Anglicans from 1764 to 1789, and the Presbyterians from 1791 to 1792, worshipped.” This also, through all the French Regime, had spacious grounds and gardens.
